The legal services industry in the UK generates around £15bn a year, which is 1.3% of GDP, while public funding of legal services amounts to just over £2bn. Interestingly, I attended a presentation recently which pointed out that this sum is less than the combined annual fee income of two City firms, Clifford Chance and Lovells (which, if you’re interested, jointly totalled around £2.35bn in 2008).

Legal services put a lot into the country’s coffers, but still the government is determined to show no generosity when it comes to funding access to justice for those without adequate resources. Why is it striving so vociferously to save a few million cutting entitlement to legal aid and reducing the fees paid to lawyers who choose to do this work, when it is content to waste vast amounts of money on failed IT systems, bailing out banks and war?

Though small in the scale of the Treasury purse, the reductions in legal aid eligibility and funding will impact enormously on the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The proposals in relation to criminal and family law cuts are well known and the arguments against them have been well rehearsed by the Law Society, the Bar Council and others. Incidentally, a ministerial statement on the new graduated family fee scheme is expected within the next week or so.

The Ministry of Justice is also consulting on proposals to change the funding rules in criminal and civil legal aid, which it says will ‘refocus resources on priority cases’.

The reforms outlined in this paper include removing legal aid from people who do not reside in the UK. As Diane Astin of the Public Law Project says, this would not only exclude from public funding cases such as those brought by the families of Baha Mousa and by Binyam Mohamed, it would also remove from scope those present in the UK but without a right of residence, such as failed asylum seekers. While they would be able to obtain legal aid to pursue their asylum claim, they would not get public funding to take an action in relation to any assault committed in detention or to challenge a refusal to provide community care services.

The Ministry of Justice also seeks to remove the devolved powers of solicitors to self-grant legal aid for judicial review cases. Other proposals outlined in the same paper include narrowing the ‘wider public interest’ test in determining whether to grant legal aid in civil cases – and seeking the defendant’s view on whether or not legal aid should be granted – as well as removing from scope certain low-value damages claims, which the MoJ says can be dealt with through complaints systems or ombudsman schemes.

Many of these proposals appear to make it harder for vulnerable people to challenge the decisions of public bodies, including the government, and put more control in the hands of the LSC. Taken together with the other legal aid reforms, it presents a very worrying trend.